David Rakoff’s Heroic Couplets

You can make a novel out of just about anything these days: recipes, PowerPoint slides, e-mails, text messages. Still, not many novelists have turned to rhyming couplets. The novel is an expansive, necessarily flexible form. Couplets, by definition, are restrictive, far more so than other rhyme schemes, which space out their repetitions, allowing the reader a breath or two before the familiar sound comes boomeranging back. An elegant narrative might be strung together from a series of sonnets, a form in the service of complex expressions of thought and feeling; Vikram Seth pulled it off in his first novel, “The Golden Gate,” in 1986. But couplets bear the stigma of gimmickry, of tipsy limericks and earworms from the Hallmark aisle. Most contemporary poets won’t touch them. Would an architect build a house out of Lincoln Logs?

Now, at the peak of summer, after the flurry of beach reads and before the arrival of fall’s tomes, we have the latest, and the last, book by the writer David Rakoff: “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish,” a novel that moves from a nineteen-twenties Chicago slaughterhouse to a Madison Avenue office in the fifties, from swinging pre-AIDS San Francisco to a contemporary Israeli settlement, all in rhyming couplets. Rakoff, who died, from cancer, last August at the age of forty-seven, was primarily an essayist, a superbly agile one. His work joined a novelist’s fine calibration of detail to a bitingly acute critical sense. He was funny as hell. But the thing that made Rakoff Rakoff was the way he built his sentences.

Rakoff once wrote about his love of Martha Stewart and his compulsive crafting habit, the hours he spent making Joseph Cornell-like boxes and invitations to other people’s weddings: “My salvation lies in time spent alone with an X-Acto knife and commercial-grade adhesive.” His essays are extensions of his art projects, each clause sculpted just so before being fitted together with the others, often at joyfully baroque length. Listening to him read his work on an audio book or “This American Life,” you could sometimes hear Rakoff strain as he got into a particularly elaborate bit of syntax. Could he make it to the end without tripping over his tongue? Then came the elegant caesura, the inhalation before gliding to the end of the phrase. Rakoff had a beautiful voice, and he knew how to use it.

For the couplets in “Love, Dishonor,” Rakoff chose anapestic tetrameter: lines of four feet, each made of three syllables, the stress falling on the last. As Janet Maslin pointed out in the Times, anapestic tetrameter provides the beat for “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and “Yertle the Turtle,” by Dr. Seuss, and the confining effect of an imposed form on Rakoff’s prose appears, at first, just as stark. Here is how “I Feel Dirty,” an essay from Rakoff’s final collection, “Half Empty,” opens: “The positive psychology movement began, in part, to address the perceived imbalance where the attributes of excellence at the upper end of the human spectrum were always being outshone by the negative.” And here is the start of “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish”: “The infant, named Margaret, had hair on her head / Thick and wild as a fire, and three times as red.”

But couplets can be far more supple and sophisticated than they first seem. They’re brought to life by accumulation, a scene or argument or joke building over a sequence of verses rather than in a glib one-two jab, and by misdirection, too. No form sets up clearer expectations of what’s to come; so much the better, then, to do what’s unexpected. “Where there is need for binding there must be some difference or separation between the things to be bound,” wrote the mid-century critic W. K. Wimsatt. Alexander Pope, the master of the form, wrung the most from their subversive possibilities. His couplets bring together the fine and the rough, the elevated and the base, as in his famous warning to the vain heroine of “The Rape of the Lock,” who might “stain her honour, or her new brocade, / Forget her pray’rs or miss a masquerade.” In “An Essay in Criticism,” published in 1711 when he was twenty-two, Pope skewered writers who took the banal ring of couplets at face value:

And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze,In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees;If Chyrstal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,The Reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with Sleep.

As if to strike back against the abusers of the form, Pope used couplets for everything: poetry, essays, and translation. He trimmed the Iliad into rhymed iambic pentameter as a French gardener might take a pair of sheers to a prehistoric forest. (Because of Pope’s, and his precursor John Dryden’s, efforts to wrangle ancient epics into their preferred shape, their verses were called “heroic.”) For Pope, rhyming couplets were the units of that essential eighteenth-century quality, wit:

True wit is Nature to advantage dress’dWhat oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d,Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find,That gives us back the notion of the mind.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Pope, with his emphasis on the role of the intellect in art and his flair for social satire, who first attracted Rakoff to rhyming couplets. “Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish” features exactly the kind of self-involved damsel that Pope would have dreamed of taking on in verse:

Susan had never donned quite so bourgeoisA garment as Thursday night’s Christian Lacroix.In college—just five years gone—she’d have abhorred itBut now, being honest, she fucking adored it.

Or maybe it was Chaucer, the inventor of rhyming couplets in English, who drew Rakoff to the form and showed him the fine line between poem and novel. With its ragtag mishmash of characters—a nun, a knight, a lawyer, a wife, a friar, a monk—all speaking in voices as distinctive as any in Dickens or Trollope, “The Canterbury Tales” could easily qualify as a novel in verse. Chaucer’s couplets catch the sounds of his pilgrims’ journey to Thomas Becket’s shrine, the up-and-down of a packhorse’s gait echoing in the rhythm of the rhymes. His couplets aren’t made for refined jeux de mots but for stories told over the noise of crowded roadside inns and the clatter of hooves; their domain is the body more often than the mind. In “The Miller’s Tale,” the bawdiest of them all, Alison, the pretty young wife of a naïve Oxford innkeeper, is seduced by the scholar Nicholas, who brazenly “caughte her by the queynte,” and disposes of a second suitor, the dainty Absolon, by sticking her bare backside over a window ledge when he climbs up a ladder in the middle of the night to offer her a kiss. When Absolon returns, he’s armed with a poker; this time, it’s Nicholas who’s waiting for him.

I thought of “The Miller’s Tale” while reading the most jubilant passage in “Love, Dishonor.” The scene is nineteen-seventies San Francisco, where Clifford, an artist who discovered he was gay as a young boy in a figure drawing class, is having insatiable fun:

O, San Francisco, I’ve left you my heart!(Tug those two down while you rub on that part…)A boy on a stoop who was palming his crotch,It seemed impolite, Clifford thought, not to watchThen up to his flat where they diddled for hours,Another one’s rump had near-magical powers;Clifford the bull and that ass the toreroThat led him for blocks the wrong way on GuerreroA mouth like a summer-ripe plum, or a calfFuzzed with golden hair, or a neck, or a laughCould make Clifford fall (and might leave him with pubic lice)And still he felt he had landed in paradise.

But it’s the modern poet Thom Gunn who watches over the scene in which Clifford next appears, wasting away from AIDS: “It was the sadness that gripped him, far more than the fear / That if facing the truth he had maybe a year.” Gunn was born in 1929 and died in 2004. He spent much of his life in San Francisco. In 1992, he published “The Man With Night Sweats,” a collection of poems about AIDS, three in rhyming couplets. “Lament” is for Gunn’s friend Allan Noseworthy, who died on a midsummer day in 1984. It’s an extraordinary work. In a hundred and sixteen lines, Gunn traces the episodes of Noseworth’s death: the body’s first failures, the pain and tedium of the hospital, the kindness of a nurse, Noseworth’s reconciliation with his estranged father, a death that comes “by drowning on an inland sea / Of your own fluids,” and Gunn’s emergence, alone, into the incongruous light of the outdoors for the burial.

…You had gone on from meAs if your body sought out martyrdomIn the far Canada of a hospital room.Once there, you entered fully the distressAnd long pale rigors of the wilderness.A gust of morphine hid you. Back in sightYou breathed through a segmented tube, fat, white,Jammed down your throat so that you could not speak.

As Joel Lovell described in the Times, Rakoff spent his last months struggling to finish “Love, Dishonor,” and wrote its final pages the month before he died. He had been toying with sections of the book for years, some for as long as a decade; couplets appealed to him long before he knew his illness would be fatal. Even so, there’s a different resonance to the writing that Rakoff produced as he raced to beat the clock. Couplets are a self-completed form. Their rhymes, a string of intermediary endings, allow the traveller who might not have the strength to go on much further a series of natural stopping points. If death had caught him off guard, Rakoff would still, in a sense, have managed to finish. In “Lament,” Thom Gunn softly makes the analogy between the end of a couplet and the end of a body: “And so you slept, and died, your skin gone grey, / Achieving your completeness, in a way.”

A writing teacher of mine used to repeat a phrase of Wordsworth’s: “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.” It’s the title of a sonnet, the first in a series of metaphors that Wordsworth draws between people who live contentedly in enclosed spaces and those, like him, who are just as happy to be confined by poetic form:

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;And hermits are contented with their cells;And students with their pensive citadels;Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:In truth the prison, into which we doomOurselves no prison is: and hence for me,In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be boundWithin the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

Rakoff was one of Wordsworth’s kindred souls, a seeker of the freedoms that only form allows. Wrapped tight in his couplets, did he find the solace Wordsworth promised? Impossible to say for sure, though the last lines he wrote offer a clue: “She’s standing and squinting, eyes half-closed from the sun / And laughing, delighted at what’s still to come.”

The league, we’ve been told for the past year, is desperate to stay out of politics. But it’s clear that some constituents are judged to be more important, more valuable, than others.

Although the N.F.L. has long banned substances such as anabolic steroids and growth hormones, the First Amendment is believed to be the only right guaranteed by the Constitution to be included on the list.